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30 June 2012

The Supreme Court did not rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

They ruled that it was a tax.

Since it's a tax nobody has standing until someone actually has to pay that tax. Two years from now if not repealed. A foolish delay and unneeded if they'd just did their damn jobs right the first time.

27 June 2012

It has been posited that it is someone's own damn fault for living in the wrong neighborhood when the po-po get the wrong address and kick down your door instead of Señor Potgrower's next door.

It has also been put forth that the Potgrowers Association of America Norte will sow fields even in good neighborhoods.

Basically this means that there's no moving away from the grow-house / meth lab.

What is a law abiding citizen to do then?

I've got something that I haven't seen talked about. Do some of these commentators think we didn't notice Señor Potgrower's entry into our neighborhood? Do they think we did not call the police about all the various and numerous violations of code and law?

What did the cops do?

NOT A GODDAMNED THING!

Not.

One.

Mother.

Fucking.

Thing.

That thing you saw with your own eyes? Hearsay.

You really say you saw it? Well, they weren't doing it when I got here. (Aside: this leads me to believe that as long as a cop doesn't actually witness a crime then no crime is committed. "How could he have been murdered, officer, you didn't SEE him alive did you?")

This sort of shit does the lather-rinse-repeat until SOMEONE finally decides to bust the grow house (almost certainly because one of his buddies or competitors is doing a plea) and then the cops find the address on their own rather than calling Dominoes and following the delivery driver in.

Yesterday I decided I needed a drive and there was a gun show in Fort Meyers.

Not too crowded because of the rain.

I scored some Hogue stocks for my Colt Detective Special.

It's a big improvement over the wooden stocks in both appearance and feel (Colt does some damn shiny blue don't they?).

The old stocks had been abused, victims of neglect and improper reassembly. I liked the wood stocks fine for looks and they were OK for feel, but they were falling apart and replacements for a '73 model Detective Special are, shall we say, rare collectables. There's lots of support for the earlier generations, the last iteration is kind of a red-headed step child.

Next at the show I acquired a lower parts kit in anticipation for the conclusion of a group purchase from the Arfcom Florida Home Team Forum. We've managed to convince Spike's Tactical to sell us stripped lower receivers with a Florida state outline in place of their more normal spider logo. CMMG brand LPK for those scoring at home. My other choices at the show were DPMS and the guy who has all the little pieces and parts.

The LPK came with the ubiquitous A2 pistol grip. Anyone who builds a couple of AR's ends up with a few of these things laying around (either because they used something like a Magpul grip or went retro or both). The CMMG grip is noticeably smaller than others in the parts bin. So far the best feeling A2 grip I have a genuine Colt take-off. It's the meter I judge the others by. It's a little wider and a touch longer and fills the hand better. The pistol grips that came with my Del-Ton kits back in 2007 match pretty well. DPMS is next closest. Anvil Arms and CMMG both included this smaller thing.

I think I may take the Colt off Kaylee, apply it to the new build and put an A1 back on.

UPDATE:

Brownells sells a genuine Colt A2 pistol grip for a mere $15. This is one item where I think Colt might be worth the extra money if you want to have an A2 type grip.

20 June 2012

The tagline at the end of one of the trailers is, "Not a true story. But it could have been..."

Oh the burning rage at that! Not only could it have been, it SHOULD have been.

Gods DAMN you Lyndon Baines Johnson for your budget devouring "Great Society". Also damn you and your successor Richard Milhous Nixon for cementing the impression that space exploration was something that only governments did or could afford to do.

But most of all Gods DAMN NASA for leaching the talent and consuming the funds to get us no further than Godsdamned Skylab for the last forty fucking years.

Damn you all and may you burn in the fires of the Nine Hells.

Space was the very first place where I noticed that government is a hinderance not an enabler. Yes, there are things that cannot be started unless a nation state-like level of wealth and power is applied to them, but once started the state must leave or it will die.

15 June 2012

Why hiring a government employee does nothing to stimulate the economy.

We will assume that everyone mentioned is single and pays their full tax rate and takes the standard deduction for simplicity.

Let's say we have a government employee who makes $50,000 a year (roughly a GS-9 step 1). Their taxable income is $44,050 and they are just into the 25% bracket and will end up paying $6,172.50 in taxes. Because money is fungible that means that they are really costing the government $43,727.50 to pay them because their taxes return to the same pile that's paying them.

So, how many $50,000 jobs does it take before we've collected enough taxes to pay one government employee the same salary? Simple math. They pay $6,172.50 each, so $43,727.50 / $6,172.50 = 7.1 (rounded).

7.1 * $50,000 = $355,022.28 in private sector income to pay enough straight taxes to make one government employee's SALARY.

Just for laughs, you have to be making $238,198.49 for a single person to be paying enough taxes to pay for one $50,000 government salary.

None of this counts the taxes the employer is paying nor the overhead costs of the government employee. The rule of thumb is that it costs three times as much as the salary for every employee. So we'd need to triple the number of workers to support each government wage. And the businesses hiring our tax payers need to have triple their salaries to pay THEIR overhead too.

So to pay one government employee it takes $3,195,200.49 in revenue that will go entirely to salary. In reality it's going to be much more since a business will also need to buy non-overhead items and will expect to make a profit.

Pretty staggering, huh?

EDIT:

How many 35 hour a week minimum wage ($7.67/hr) workers does it take to pay one $50k a year government salary? 50.261 straight up, 150.78 to account for overhead.

There's water in the phone lines and our line apparently dialed 911 and disconnected. The same water is preventing anyone from calling the house phone. Joy.

The Lovely Harvey comes running into where I was head-banging with my headphones on and says, ".........................................!" which I don't hear because I have headphones on.

Taking them off I hear the third repetition, "There's someone ringing the doorbell!" So I grab Kaylee, chamber a round and head for the door. I look out the peep and there's Deputy Friendly. Saying, to Harvey, but too loud, "Honey, I just answered the door with a gun and it's the cops!"

Putting the gun around the corner of the couch, I open the door and get the story.

I know why I chose my Chevys. My first moddable car was a '76 Camaro. I learned a lot about wrenching on that car and discovered that rodding a Chevy was a ton cheaper than Ford or MOPAR (at least at the time, it could be different now).

There's brand specific knowledge that you pick up, so my next projects were also Chevy. No need to learn new things staying in brand.

But this fails to explain why some people are so damned militant about their brand of AR.

You hear that Colt is best. OK. Quantify that.

Cue cricket.

There was a lengthy thread on Arfcom where the attempt to fuss out what breaks on lesser carbines was made. Pat Roberts even posted his observations from running carbine classes. Wanna know what breaks on a "cheap" AR? The bolt, extractor and gas key. Pages and pages of blue cursing and bile and the conclusion seems to be: Buy a cheap AR, get a complete Colt bolt from Brownells and check the staking on the gas key.

Colt does make a decent product, but cosmetically they can be quite bad. Doesn't affect the function, but it's rough. For less money I can get pretty with the same function. I mentioned it in one of the threads talking about the cosmetics, "If they don't care to bother making the outside smooth and regular, why would I develop any confidence it's any better inside?" It shows they are cheaping out on something. A $1,500+ AR had better be as cosmetically pleasing as a $800 one.

There's a lot of snobbery about kit guns too. Every single one of my ARs is a kit gun. Mostly because it's cheaper and I like configurations that aren't offered as complete rifles from the large makers. It gets amusing because they are talking up Colt quality and bad mouthing kit guns... My R604 clone is nearly all Colt parts. Just the lower receiver and lower parts kit are non-Colt; the rest is entirely Air Force surplus. It's my best shooting 5.56 AR... But it's a mere kit gun, so the Colt content is irrelevant.

Never mind the political Bullshit that never stops from Colt. There's a laundry list of things that were different on a Colt than any other AR because they kept trying to curry favor by neutering their guns. Then there was the great LE screwing where they'd go the extra mile to make sure their distributors were not selling guns to mere civilians. More obscure is the perpetual contract from the 1966 "one time buy" that just keeps getting amended that keeps the price up and ruins competition because of how the technical data package will be handled. Did you know the M16 was the first milspec item that referred to confidential data from the original maker and not just to a drawing included in the spec? There are several places that effectively say, "See Colt's drawing for the actual specification." To make a genuinely milspec AR you need to have that drawing and meet its specifications.

You could reverse engineer it, and many have, but you'd still need the drawing to confirm you'd succeeded. The '66 contract makes sure you will and you will pay Colt for it.

04 June 2012

I have had my newest boils lanced and drained, got antibiotics and been admonished for not going to see the doctor sooner.

He indicated that I am lucky to have as robust an immune system as I appear to have. I merely had a mild fever, but the stuff in the boils indicated the infection was more severe than my fever was showing.